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Cyborg configurations as formations of (self-)creation in the imagination space of technological (re)production (II): The promises of monsters and posthuman anthropomorphisms

Verena Kuni

For an introduction into the context of «mythical bodies» and their cyborg configurations, refer to the introduction in Part I. Part II focuses on the «promises of monsters» and posthuman anthropomorphisms of technological stories of (re)production as mirrored in the computer-generated visions of contemporary art and the current game culture.

Body projections under posthuman conditions

Artists, male and female alike, reacted early on to the ‹monstrous promises› of the new technologies—however in rather different ways. «Be Art!», for instance, is the motto into which Natasha Vita More translated the imperative of cyborgization. As a dedicated «extropian» and «transhumanist»—i.e. a follower of the view that with the aid of the new technologies, humans have to equip themselves to overcome the weaknesses, and above all the mortality, of their organisms—Vita More also regards her participation in courses to become a nutrition specialist, a fitness trainer and a futurologist as part of her training as an artist. For this reason, she not only consistently works on her own body using those body

technologies that are customarily available, in her project «Primo Posthuman 3M+» (2000 ff.)—which she wants to be understood as «transhumanist net.art»—she develops a design for the future that is intended to illustrate the conditions of the future posthuman body. This designer body—an idealized and animated 3- D model based on Vita More's own body mass—demonstrates the technological processes which are necessary to equip and upgrade the human organism in order to be able to remove «political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits» and to overcome «constraints on our progress and possibilities as individuals, as organizations, and as a species,» as formulated by Vita More's partner, the writer Max More, in his manifesto «Principles of Extropy. An evolving framework of values and standards for continuously improving the human condition.» [1]

Since the late nineteen-nineties, to take measurements of the human body and project them into virtual space in order to explore the conditions of the posthuman body is a process that has been encountered frequently in art. In the meantime, like stimuli are by no means solely being supplied by